Oracle Vm Virtualbox Extension Pack Kosten
Adriana Gowen
I used to install from the Oracle PPA, but since the end of the two different versions of vbox, I've been installing from the Ubuntu repos. I've found the package for installing the guest additions iso, but never been aware of the extension packs being there.
To ease installing of extension packs to Virtual Box versions provided by the repositories we maintain a download helper script in the multiverse repository from Ubuntu >= 15.10 which will download the extension pack from Oracle (virtualbox-ext-pack).
I don't think Oracle makes a difference betwwen dev, test and production. If you use it for business purposes, even while developing, they might have the right to send a bill depending on the jurisdiction you're in.
There is a good chance that whomever is using VirtualBox in this application may be using it as part of an automated test setup. I use it to test software on multiple operating systems. I can control the VM through VBoxManage and then run all the tests via SSH. The whole thing is orchestrated automatically via a bash script.
None of that requires the VirtualBox Extension Pack however, which adds some rather niche features, mainly related to USB device pass through. The problem in this case is with the VB EP, which you can download from the VB web site, but only for personal use and evaluation.
This has been a problem for oracle customers for decades. It was possible for a DBA to implement high availability features the customer hadn't licenced for years. Normally the manager responsible for the budget wouldn't be aware of it until either the annual lice bill suddenly leapt up or the got a call from Oracles Compliance team that would normally be followed up by a compulsory software audit if you wanted to avoid the bill.
In some cases the unfortunate DBS had embedded useful but expensive features so deep in the infrastructure that they couldn't be unpicked, in that case Oracle would usually make a 'special arrangement' if you committed to licencing the additional tools they would graciously apply your normal account discounts (90% in my case) but there was usually a bit of leverage applied to try and replace some non Oracle product with Oracles at the same time. I never fell foul of this issue personally as I was forewarned before moving into a tech management role and I briefed my DBA's but since going independent I've come across plenty of DBA's who have fallen down that particular pit. When I first stared working with oracle there was no competing product for High volume transaction processing other than DB2. I've always liked the product but always disliked the company. it seems endemic in the software industry, Microsoft tried to charge me for 1000 copies if windows because I had got rid of the boxes of floppy disks, Computer Associates tried to double the cost of my disk compression software when they bought the company. I found in all cases that if you had a corporate relationship with the company and your organisation had some industry visibility you could stand your ground and get it sorted out but I would have hated to be in that position in a smaller company.
One of IBM's gimmicks with Informix is to push it for embedded systems so there are ARM ports. A bit of scratching around shows there's also a PHP module. Hmmm. A Pi Nextcloud server running on Informix? If I ever have a spare week to play with that...
From my reading of the Oracle DB license: if you are virtualizing Oracle DB installs, Virtualbox is pretty much your only option if you want to have your Hyper-threads not count as full cores are far as licensing is concerned.
I won't have MySQL, Virtual Box, Java or any of their rubbish. But loads of stuff requires it, I've had a look at some open source projects but had to bin them straight away because they use Virtual Box to run an emulator. So many online project use it for VMs. It's possible employees are downloading it to play with stuff.
Oracle licencing terms are licencing terms, not law. If you don't use their software, they don't apply to you. If you use their software without agreeing to them, they still don't apply to you, but they might be able to sue for copyright violation.
"ORACLE DATABASE STANDARD EDITION - NAMED USER PLUS 3 YEAR" plus software updates/support. 20 named users (wouldn't recommend this config for an DB running an internet facing app), was $6,300 at the time. I was (and still sort of am) unsure how many named users I needed, I probably could of gotten away with maybe 2 or 3 given that really nothing other than vCenter (which had 2 DBs one for vCenter itself one for VMware Update manager - so 2 named users?) and nightly datapump job for backups. But I saw the cost of 20 and just said screw it license it for a bit more just in case.
I'm sure our license was too small for Oracle to care, they contacted me at least once or twice a year trying to upsell something. I explained what we use Oracle for and there wasn't any opportunities for upsell in this environment. They always understood(sometimes it took some additional explaining) in the end and left me alone for another 6-12 months.
One crazy bit is for a while they were pestering me about renewing support, support that didn't expire for another 2 years. I never understood that. I see emails from last year reminding me my support is expiring in 2020 and the cost to renew the support is .."USD $3.15" .. eventually those emails stopped.
I haven't dug into Oracle's licensing recently but several years ago standard edition could run on unlimited cores and you generally paid per socket(max of 4 I think). vs the enterprise which has the funky per-core licensing. I think Oracle SE even included RAC licensing at one point anyway.
I went through two Oracle audits with a company back in 2006(happened just as I joined the company) and again in 2008. Boss ignored my advice to change to standard edition in 2006 (they were originally licensed for "Standard edition one" if that version still exists, for a DB on an internet facing social media site). They had Enterprise edition installed.
They paid hefty fines and were assured everything was OK after the audit in 2006 so my boss ignored my advice. Auditors came around again in 2008 and found lots of new violations, this time they accepted my advice and I went through the process of migrating everything to standard edition(found it ironic the Oracle staff were not aware of the per socket licensing advantages to Oracle SE vs per-core licensing on Oracle Enterprise), even changing the CPUs from dual core (optimal for per-core licensing on fast cores) to quad core (better for standard edition more power). HP found out the DL380s they sold us as quad core capable ended up not being quad core capable they had to replace the motherboards (some time later they updated their docs reflecting some early boards could not do quad core processors).
The migration from Oracle EE to Oracle SE at that company was pretty painless, I mean no app changes, I did all the work. We had a Oracle consulting company that helped manage things and their custom monitoring app required partitions, so it was their standard practice to install Oracle EE with partitioning ($$$), so they had to change their shit around, but they realized they should do that anyway.
At least with Oracle 10g which is what we had at the time I think, we were still able to leverage Oracle enteprise manager with the performance packs and stuff (against the license), it was easy to wipe the installation from the DB when it came time for the next audit, no issues(semi regularly wiped the config for that anyway due to problems, didn't care about data retention on that stuff). Newer Oracle I noticed it didn't seem possible to install things that way anymore. Really missed the performance packs, I'm not a DBA but it was just amazing to see how quickly anyone could track stuff down, vs MySQL even in 2019 is nowhere close to it(and the way things have progressed in mysql over the past decade MySQL will probably never get to where Oracle was 10-15 years ago).
Forgot to mention part of the migration to Oracle SE was some of our dev/test systems ran on single socket ESX installations (technically vmware did not support single socket at the time), Oracle didn't support their DB on ESX either I believe (had to repro any issues on bare metal). Our production OLTP systems ran on bare metal but everything else was in an "unsupported" configurations mainly for cost savings(servers were dual socket just pulled one cpu out). didn't have any clusters, each ESX system was stand alone, no vmotion, no HA, didn't even have vCenter, just ESX Standard edition I think it was called. Never had an issue.
I'm sure there's a sizeable pension fund that needs draining along with numerous assets that can be flogged off to fund one last round of bumper bonuses before the company is sold off to a local used car dealer for a quid.
i placed a softwre on the xxx video clips (Orckle) web site nd guess wht, you vīsīted this website to hve dtbse fűn (you know wht i mean). While you were viewing trnsctions, yoűr web brőwser initīatd őprating s a RDP having a keylőgger which gav me ccessibility to your scrn and cm. Right after that, my software collectd all of yőűr contacts from yőur Orcle, s wll as -mail . and then ī mde a doubl-screen vīdeo. 1st part shows the tbl;es yoű wer watching (yoű hve a nice tste in brgepőlis lől . . .), and nxt part shows the view of yőur webcm, & it īs u.
Well, if it's work related, they'd be licencing it properly, of course. If an employer or client needs an app to have unfettered net access, it's going to be on a separate physical/virtual client with suitably generous FW rules. And there's always VPNs, etc if you're worried.
Some companies have a requirement in their licenses agreement that you have to allow their product to phone home and report usage. Failing to allow the phone home can result in a letter from the vendor demanding more money.